Salesforce’s AI Agents resolve 85% of support inquiries—Benioff on what’s next
Marc Benioff offered an insightful take on the impact of AI agents during his TECHtalk interview, spotlighting how Salesforce is using them to transform customer support.
In March, the company reported its Agentforce AI agents were already resolving 85% of customer queries—30,000 out of ~35,000 weekly conversations. They've now processed over 1/2 million inquiries.
Similar results were shared by ServiceNow on its latest earnings call, Zendesk at its recent user conference, both using their own technology to support their clients. AI I is already having a huge impact on customer support, which I have been discussing as one of the most promising AI use cases (and different from customer service).
Support is a major function at Salesforce, with 9,000 of its 75,000 employees (~12% of the workforce) handling 1.8M annual inquiries.
Benioff didn’t specify the baseline but said that Salesforce plans to redeploy 50% of its support roles into new functions.
Benioff emphasized the corporate responsibility to support the workforce through this transition through education, reskilling, and redeployment opportunities.
He reaffirmed Salesforce’s long-standing commitment to education, citing its support for public schools in San Francisco and Oakland, and reminded us that training and redeployment have been part of the company’s fabric from the start.
He sees a path to redeploy support talent into revenue-generating roles.
I commend Marc for being open in discussing these issues.